147 years of Coney Island's shifting incarnations on display at four Connecticut arts venues

When Walt Whitman lived in Brooklyn, N.Y., from 1836 to 1850, he frequently visited the beach at Coney Island, which he described as "a long, bare, unfrequented shore, which I had all to myself."

Compare this to the wonderland remembered by the artist Joseph Stella. In presenting his colossal 1914 oil-on-canvas "Battle of Lights, Coney Island, Mardi Gras," Stella wrote "I built the most intense arabesque that I could imagine in order to convey in a hectic mood the surging crowd and the revolving machines generating for the first time, not anguish and pain, but violent, dangerous pleasures."

The two sketches seem a world apart, not depictions of the same stretch of Brooklyn shorefront. Coney Island, in 147 years of shifting incarnations — from a serene strand dotted by a few resort hotels; to the incessantly teeming "Sodom by the Sea"; to the diminished playland of today — is the subject of the Wadsworth Atheneum's huge installation, "Coney Island: Visions of an American Dreamland, 1861-2008," opening Jan. 31. The comprehensive and dynamic show features 140 artworks in a variety of media, as well as ephemera, artifacts and film clips showing Coney Island throughout the decades.

Three other art spaces in Connecticut — at Real Art Ways in Hartford, Yale School of Art gallery in New Haven and at Westport Arts Center — complement the Atheneum's Coney Island show. Yale focuses on sideshow "freaks," Westport on photography of Coney Island and Real Art Ways on abstracted impressions of the legendary amusement area.

The Atheneum's grand display features the Stella painting — 7 feet wide by 6 and 1/2 feet high — as its centerpiece and the reason for the exhibit's existence. Robin Jaffee Frank, chief curator and Krieble Curator of American Paintings and Sculpture, came across the Stella years ago, when she was a curator at Yale University Art Gallery, which owns it.

"No painting captures Coney Island's modernity ... its blaze of electricity ... better than Joseph Stella's painting," said Frank. "He was an Italian immigrant and he saw Coney Island from two perspectives, as an insider and an outsider."

The idea of an exhibit formed in Frank's mind, she said, both to look at Coney Island from the perspective of artists, but also to celebrate "Coney Island not as a strip of sand in Brooklyn, but as a very particular place in the American imagination."

When Frank was hired away from Yale by the Atheneum in December 2011, the exhibit-in-progress came with her. After Hartford, the exhibit will travel to San Diego (July 11-Oct. 13), Brooklyn — of course — (Nov. 20-March 13, 2016) and San Antonio (May 11, 2016-Sept. 11, 2016).

Frank is a native of Brooklyn and Long Island and her exhibit is informed by her fond memories of childhood visits to Coney Island. Once the exhibit moves past Coney Island's quaint early days — where Punch and Judy shows, riding donkeys and phony shipwrecks entertained vacationers — the overall spirit of the assemblage of both high and low art is one of merriment, awe and often wary fascination with an entertainment nerve center so overstuffed with choices as to seem out of control.

"You get a dizzying sense that you're being pushed into a vortex, a perception change, you get a sense of sensory immersion going to Coney Island," she said. "You get a mixing of people from all walks of life, all races, ethnicities and classes.

"People met people they never would have met anywhere else," she said. "When first entering Steeplechase Park, you'd go through the Barrel of Love, which would spiral around and strangers would fall against each other. People would lose their inhibitions, they would get the sense that on these rides there would be chance encounters."

The sense of a free-for-all was greatly helped by the early embrace of electric lighting at Luna Park, Steeplechase and Dreamland, Coney Island's major amusement parks. Hundreds of thousands of light bulbs stayed on until the wee hours. "Coney Island changed the way Americans played," Frank said. "It extended leisure time way into the night."

The not-always-innocent nighttime appeal is best embodied by the artist most closely associated with Coney Island, Reginald Marsh. In nine artworks — egg temperas, watercolors and ink — Marsh depicts a world of shapely beauties and flirting men jam-packed in and around amusements both wholesome and debased.

There are exceptions to Frank's fond memories of Coney Island. "Cy the Cyclops scared me to death as a child," she said, referring to the giant one-eyed head that presided over the Spook-A-Rama ticket booth. "So this is my revenge."

The five-foot-tall wall-mounted sculpture, loaned to the exhibit by the family who runs Deno's Wonder Wheel amusement park, is installed at the entrance to the exhibit galleries, flanked by two creepy paintings by Arnold Mesches, in which Cy presides over sinister-looking amusement parks.

However, Cy isn't the creepiest face to be seen in the exhibit. The Steeplechase Funny Face can be perceived both as a silly invitation to have fun or a menacing invitation to misbehave. Its contradictory appeal led one commentator, in 1905, to say "Perhaps Coney Island is the most human thing that God ever made, or permitted the devil to make."

'MATRIX 171: SIDESHOW'

Also opening on Jan. 31 is the 171st exhibition in the Atheneum's long-running MATRIX series, with artwork by Michael C. McMillen.

"CONEY ISLAND: VISIONS OF AN AMERICAN DREAMLAND, 1861-2008" will be at Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, 600 Main St. in Hartford, from Jan. 31 to May 31. "MATRIX 171: SIDESHOW" will run through May 3. Museum hours are Wednesday, Thursday and Friday 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., weekends 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. www.thewadsworth.org.